Despite seizing upon any opportunities this fiscal year to save money, city comptroller Ron Eldridge estimated a deficit of about $225,644 in a financial report given at the Urbana City Council’s regular meeting Monday night.

The city of Urbana undertook several actions in attempt to be frugal, such as reducing police and fire department overtime, reducing fire equipment and public works training expenses and shifting costs of leaf pickup to the recycling fund. Also, for this fiscal year and most likely the next, six municipal positions will remain vacant.

Though two transfers of funds and a property tax payment of $204,000 from Provena Covenant Medical Center may cause minor relief this year, Eldridge predicts that the deficit will continue into next year.

“It’s a little worse situation than we had hoped to be (in),” Eldridge said.

Plus, the city recently went into arbitration with the police union. None of Eldridge’s projections account for salary changes, which would need to be retroactive to July 1, 2010. For each 1 percent salary adjustment, an extra $202,000 would be added to expenses for this fiscal year and the next.

Eldridge said revenues are expected to be slightly below the budget, as the last three months of last year came out worse than anticipated. Eldridge is still hopeful, though.

“Generally, I’m kind of pleased with our revenues,” Eldridge said, “I think they bounced back – although slowly – and it’s going to take a while for them to recover.”

For next year, Eldridge projects a 3.7 percent increase in revenues but a lingering deficit of $483,000, which will be funded by hospital addition building fees.

“I think ($358,000) is a manageable number given our total budget is around $32 million,” he said, “I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy, and I’m sure there will be some tough decisions here, but I don’t think that that’s a disaster.”

In a second report, Market Director Lisa Bralts spoke about the Market at the Square farmer’s market in 2010 and touched on plans for this year. This year’s opening day is May 7.

As farmer’s markets increase in popularity on a national and state level, Bralts said strategic planning continues on Urbana’s highly successful market and will soon be finished. An estimated crowd count of 195,000 patrons visited the market, which is above the previous year’s turnout by about 20,000 people and “an all-time high by a long short,” Bralts said.

One of the first things on the agenda for the strategic plan, as soon as weather permits, is work on upgrading the electrical infrastructure at the market.

Notwithstanding a 5.8 percent dip in the number of registered vendors, Bralts attributed the problem to an overflow of vendors requesting space during the peak season. Many of these potential vendors pulled out upon being put on a wait list. To alleviate this issue, community groups will be moved to one side of Walnut Street to allow for an expansion of space for vendors.

Revenues increased in 2010 because of a vendor fee increase of five dollars (from $15 per week to $20 per week); overall incurred costs have gone up.

Last season was the pilot year of accepting credit, debit and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program/Link cards. This allowed market staff to use wireless machines to swipe cards and distribute tokens as cash. Bralts said they hope to partner with the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District to attract more Link users.

In 2010, the market’s staff struggled to keep up with the increased activity, which led Bralts to propose the hiring of an on-site manager along with two aids.

During the Committee of the Whole, an amendment to the annual budget ordinance was approved, allowing funding from the Motor Vehicle Parking System to be used for the Urbana Signage and Wayfaring plan’s first phase: parking and regulatory signage.